Brush Back

Joel grabbed the edge of the piano. His forehead was beaded with sweat. He looked around, from me to Mr. Contreras, from me to the door. He couldn’t flee, not in his pajamas and no shoes.

“Before,” I said with certainty. “A

Joel didn’t say anything, but his shoulders slumped farther.

“Must have taken a certain amount of courage to go into that tu

“Don’t patronize me,” he panted. “I’m not the man Ira was, I’m afraid of my own shadow, you can’t believe I could actually go to Wrigley Field and sneak into a tu

Mr. Contreras cleared his throat, but I shook my head at him: waiting was the only useful strategy here. I tried not to listen to the ticking of the clock. Tick, Bernie, tock, grievous bodily—no.

“All right, I was in love with her,” Joel burst out. “Who wouldn’t be, such a beautiful bright girl. And then I heard she was hanging around with Warshawski. I knew I didn’t have a prayer. They laughed at me, Spike and his buddies, telling me she’d been seen with him. ‘Why would she care about an overweight nerd like you? And one who usually likes boys better than girls, anyway.’ Spike. That was his line, but all the others copied him.”

His lips were flecked with white and his breath stank.

“Get him a glass of water,” I said to Mr. Contreras, keeping my eyes on Joel.

“I don’t want water. Get me the hair of the dog. You’ll see it easily enough,” Joel said.

“So you went up to Wrigley,” I prodded.

“Yes, I went up there, she’d told me where she’d put it, inside some loose asbestos tape around one of the pipes, and I found it.”

“What was it?” I asked sharply.

“A photo album that she’d stored papers in. I couldn’t make sense of them: canceled checks, an accounting statement for the Scanlon Agency, a statement for the law firm and also one for Scanlon’s youth club—his obnoxious Say, Yes! program that everyone who worked at Mandel & McClelland had to donate to.”

“What did you do with the documents?” I asked.

“I was flipping through the pages, so bewildered I didn’t leave the damned tu

“Never mind that. Did you take them with you?”

“I was trying to pick them up when this maintenance man came in, wanting to know what the fuck I was doing in there. I said I got lost looking for the men’s room and he marched me out. I only managed to save part of a bank statement. When I got home, I saw another page had stuck to it—someone had torn it in two and taped it back together and the tape stuck to the bank statement.”

He licked his dry lips. “Where’s the old man with my drink?”

Mr. Contreras came out with a glass of water. “You don’t need alcohol to get you through the day, young man. You drink this and start pulling yourself together.”

Joel knocked Mr. Contreras’s hand away. “What, are you another goddam friend of Ira and Eunice’s sent to make me take the pledge?”

Joel left the room. I got up to follow him but collapsed as a wave of dizziness swept through me. I half fell onto the piano. By the time I’d steadied myself, Joel had returned with a half gallon of Grey Goose and a glass.

“The papers,” I said sharply. “What about the torn-up note?”

“It said—never mind, I have it someplace.”

He put the vodka and glass on a side table and went into another room, where we heard him opening drawers and rustling through papers. He came back with a tattered, yellowed page. At the top, someone had written in a tidy hand: FYI, Law and Order Man. The text was also handwritten, by a different person:

Thanks for the $7500 to our Widows & Orphans Fund. You know by now that your boys have been released—the SA agrees that youthful high spirits aren’t grounds for arrest. Our overzealous officer will be moving to the Seventh, where you can count on the unit’s hostility to snitches to keep him from bothering you again.

“Whose writing is this?” My voice came out in a croak: I was sure I knew who the overzealous officer had been.

“Don’t know. Someone in the police, I guess. I asked A

“When did you talk to her about this?” I demanded.

“The night she died.” He poured vodka into the glass, but stared at it, not drinking, seeing a past that made him twist his mouth into a grimace of self-loathing.

“I tried figuring out what was so important about the things she’d hidden up at Wrigley. All I had was that one page of a bank statement, but it was from Continental Illinois, not Ferrite, where Mandel and Scanlon’s insurance agency and all of us banked—neighborhood solidarity, you know. It showed the balance from Say, Yes! but it was before the Internet, back when you still got your canceled checks sent to you in the mail. The page I found showed the closing balance, which was big for such a small neighborhood organization, I think it was ninety-three thousand.”

“You didn’t keep it?” I asked.

“No, I left it at A

“What? The night she died?”

He swallowed half the vodka in the glass, winced as the alcohol jolted his body.

“Yes, the night she died,” he mumbled. “I tried to figure out what the deal was with the Say, Yes! bank statement, why she thought it was worth hanging on to, and I thought it had to do with the fact that Scanlon kept the funds downtown, in the biggest bank in the state. I started working late—Ira was so pleased, he thought I was finding a vocation for the law. He didn’t know all I had was a vocation for A

“So they were using the Say, Yes! foundation funds to bankroll elections, or at least Hurlihey’s election?” I asked.

Joel shrugged. “Maybe, I suppose.”

“Why didn’t you turn them in?” Mr. Contreras asked. “They sound like a room full of crooks!”

“Turn them in to who? Rory and Sol’s cronies?” Joel jeered. “They were players, the SA was a player, they probably all played together. Anyway, what evidence did I have? A piece of a bank statement and an ambiguous conversation. I went to A

Mr. Contreras was watching the clock in agony. He tugged on my arm, but I needed to get as much as I could from Joel if we were going to construct any kind of file that would persuade the thugs to release Bernie.

“I knew what nights her mother played bingo over at Saint Eloy’s. I waited across the street until Stella had taken off, then I went to the door. Stella had beaten her: A

“I was so upset at seeing her all messed up that I forgot at first why I’d come. She laughed off her injuries, she wouldn’t let me take her to the hospital: she said she was going to be rid of all of us soon. I put my arms around her, I said something stupid, like, you don’t want to be rid of me, I’m the one who understands you, I helped you with your music composition that got you into Bryn Mawr. I even tried to kiss her. She put my face aside. She tried to cover up what she was feeling, but I could see the disgust in her face.” He rubbed his cheek, the spot where he could still feel her hand on him.